Ep. 21 My Nervous System Spent $15,000 (What Happens When a Pattern Makes Your Decisions)

I paid $15,000 for a program my intuition told me to walk away from. And when it came time to say it wasn't working - I didn't ask for a single dollar back. That wasn't a financial decision. That was a pattern making decisions on my behalf. The over-explaining. The going cold. The avoiding until it becomes a crisis. The shrinking when you need to stay present. That's not a leadership problem. It's so much older than that.

Book 1:1 here

Transcript

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Hey, I'm Leslie Turner. I'm a mom, a somatic practitioner, and an intuitive coach. This is the Intuitive Drop. Short conversations about emotional truth, the nervous system, and living from your intuition in real life without losing your mind along the way. Let's drop in. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of The Intuitive Drop. So, with this episode, I want to tell you about a time I made a $15,000 decision that wasn't, it felt like it wasn't me making it. I mean, I did make it. It was me. I signed up, I transferred the money. But if I'm being honest, and that's kind of the whole point of this podcast, right? The decision was made before I could think clearly about it. It was made by something much older and more knee-jerk than my rational mind could click in. Something that had been running those high-stakes moments my whole life and was very, very good at its job. But I didn't know that then. I didn't have a language for it then, but I know it now. And I want to talk about what that pattern looks like. Because this is not just in my story. This is probably in yours, especially if you are leading people. So maybe you have a team or a company, a department or a family. This pattern is not just running your biggest moments at work. It learned its job long before you had a title. And it's impacting every area of your life. The next time you're about to walk into something hard, a conversation where someone's going to push back or get defensive, a decision with real stakes or a moment when you're being questioned and challenged. Notice what happens in your body before you even open your mouth. So as you're approaching that door, as you're approaching that person, what is going on in your body? For me and for a lot of people, there's a tightening of the chest, a weightedness there, the breath gets shallower, and your body is bracing. Like the body is prepared for impact before that conversation even gets started. Now, some people will go small in that moment. They will overexplain themselves. They'll apologize before having done anything wrong. They hedge each statement. They walk out of the room having given away more than they intended and they don't really know why. Then there's other people who go hard or they shut down. They get very controlled and clipped, very careful with their words. They lead from the head because the body stopped feeling safe for them somewhere in the middle of it. Neither of those, if you notice yourself in that, neither of those is you leading. That's a pattern leading. And the pattern has been doing its job long before you were called a leader. The way you show up in high-stakes moments at work, especially, is almost never about work. It's about the first place that you learned what happens when there's conflict or when authority is displeased with you, when something is at stake and you have less power than the person across from you. I remember moments like that from growing up and being kind of a little minion of a person at the job, and the boss was very intimidating. But it usually starts before that, too. For most of us, that place was home around a childhood dinner table, a parent's tone of voice, maybe with a teacher or a coach, somewhere we learned, not in the words or the logic or the mind, but in the body, what conflict means and what it costs. And then what the smart play is when it arrives. That learning, that depth of learning never left us. And then we got a job title and took it with us. The leader who overexplains when challenged, like I said, they're not actually lacking confidence. They learned somewhere early that being questioned required a full defense, that you had to justify yourself thoroughly or something bad would happen. The one who goes cold and unreachable under pressure, that's not a strategy or being strategic. That's shutting down to keep them safe because the body remembers something there. The one who avoids hard conversations until it becomes a full crisis mode, they didn't learn that conflict could resolve. They learned that it escalates. So they wait and manage and hope it dissolves on their own. And then they wonder why the same problems keep coming up. Now, these aren't personality issues, they're survival strategies. They worked once, and now they're running your entire leadership strategy. A few years ago, I was new in Owen Sound. It was postpartum. I was still a naturopath, but I was starting to feel the edges of that identity loosen, starting to see that what I was really drawn to was more the emotional patterning underneath everything, the stuff that medicine would kind of point to, but never really touch. And I found this program created by another naturopathic doctor, kind of a done-for-you group health program for women, hormonal health, stress. Each month had a theme. And the idea was that I would license it and run it here in Owen Sound as essentially a satellite location. And it looked great on paper. And my gut said, I'm not sure. Maybe just wait on this, sit with this. And guess what? I did not listen. I paid $15,000 for this. And if I'm honest about why, it wasn't because the program was necessarily right for me. It was because I was afraid I wasn't enough in this new place. I didn't have a community here. I didn't have a reputation. I was postpartum and uncertain and slightly lost. And this program felt like a shortcut to legitimacy, like proof that I belonged here and had something to offer. So my pattern made the decision. The fear of not being enough dressed up as a business opportunity. I sat with it for a while and I eventually realized that this isn't gonna work a couple months after I paid the money. Not in a small city where women know each other and aren't going to sit in a group and talk about their hormones and their stress with their neighbor across from them. And the more I looked at it, the less I could get behind it anyway. So I called her, the original creator of this, to tell her that I wasn't gonna use it. And when I was preparing for that conversation, I noticed that my chest was very tight, my heart was racing. There was a level of dread that had nothing to do with this woman specifically, and everything to do with what I had learned, conflict with authority meant. So I went into the conversation in almost a child-to-parent mode, bracing, already apologizing internally, already certain I wasn't gonna get what I wanted and maybe shouldn't even ask. And she said, okay, destroy the binders I gave you. Well, you'll be off the website today. I said, okay. And I didn't ask for my money back, not one dollar. I didn't push, I didn't advocate for myself. I walked away from $15,000 without a single attempt to recover any of it. Because the pattern that ran me into that conversation also ran me through it. And that pattern had learned a long time ago that pushing back on authority doesn't end well for the person with less power. But here's where I've kind of like landed. It's been a few years. Holding that as evidence of my own, I want to say stupidity, is just the pattern running a different play. And I've said, oh my gosh, Les, you're such an idiot for that. But that just keeps it active and alive. It keeps the money that feeling dense in my body. It keeps the lesson from actually landing. And the lesson isn't that I'm bad at decisions. The lesson is that the pattern was making them. The stakes are higher in leadership roles. The moments are more visible. And the pattern has more opportunities to run the show. Every hard conversation that you've avoided, every time you've overexplained in a meeting and felt smaller afterwards, every decision made from fear of not being enough, not enough experience, not enough authority, not enough proof that you belong at this level. Every time you went cold when you needed to stay present is the pattern. That's not a leadership problem. That's not you needing more leadership coaching. That's a pattern problem. You can know exactly what regulated values-led leadership looks like. You can understand it intellectually. You could know what you should do in each moment. And the pattern will still get there first because it doesn't live in your head, it lives somewhere else entirely. It lives in the body. And the body will show up in the boardroom too. And just as a side or part of this, if you're leading a team and raising kids at the same time, it's the same nervous system doing both jobs. What activates in hard conversations at work and what activates at the dinner table when your kid pushes back on you, those probably have the same return address. That's and that's not meant to guilt trip you. That's actually just really useful information because when you start to do this work, both of those rooms change. The pattern running your hardest moment isn't your character flaw. It isn't proof that you're not cut out for this. It's very old, very intelligent strategy that kept you safe in a context when you needed it. Because you had to protect yourself at one point. And it it did its job beautifully. But you don't need it anymore. And unfortunately, your body doesn't know that yet. On the other side of the deep pattern work, it looks like this. And it's not that hard conversations become easy. It's that you stop arriving to them already braced. You walk in knowing where you stand, knowing who you are, not performing authority, just living in it. And that's the difference between the two things, those two things that everyone in the room can feel. Are you performing it or are you inhabiting it? Decisions will start to feel different too, not because you have all of the information, but because you can actually hear yourself, your highest, your intuition. And you know you're making a decision that is in your highest and greatest evolution because it's a little nerve-wracking and a little exciting at the same time. That combination that is actual expansion. Once you know what that feels like in your body, you stop mistaking fear as an opportunity to do something different. And then there's peace, inner peace. That's a thing that people don't expect. Not necessarily happiness or insane confidence. It's peace. There's a settledness in the body that wasn't there before because you're not managing yourself through every high-stakes moment anymore. You're just there, you're present, you're grounded, you're enough. And that's what's cool about doing this work. And on the other side of it, it's not that you've got a better set of leadership tools, it's a different relationship with yourself in the moment that matters the most. So if this resonated with you, if you're like, yeah, I want to be the grounded know-myself leader, come find me at Leslyturner.ca or on Instagram. Let's start a conversation. If you're a leader and you run a team and something in this episode named a thing you've been feeling, but you haven't had a language for, I want to talk to you. That's exactly my territory. And if you're doing this while raising kids, oh my goodness. That's not for the pain of heart. I understand this, and you may want to dive a little deeper into it. We'll see you next week. If something in this landed for you, I'd love to support you further. Whether that's through private sessions, ongoing containers, or simply listening to another episode, trust what feels right. All the ways to work with me are linked below. There's no pressure, just options. Thank you for being here and for doing the quiet, brave work of listening to yourself.